Are you boasting that you're boosted?
Tired of being tasked with masking?
Weary of the jibber-jabbing?
As you do your part to eradicate the coronavirus pandemic, indulge in a bit of fantasy that it has —poof!— disappeared. Write a short piece (up to 200 words) on any subject without using any of the letters that form the acronym "COVID." That's right. You have two fewer vowels and three fewer consonants to use. And, yes, you can't use "I". It can be in verse or prose (or, if we at T5F were following the rules: "Pen a jam just any way").
So while, in real life, you treat COVID as the threat it is, you can conjure its disappearance through graphemic and phonetic elimination.
Send your entry to engalums@pitt.edu by March 31, 2022.
Our judge will be Senior Lecturer Jeff Oaks (who was featured in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of T5F). Oaks has taught writing at Pitt for over 30 years; his journalling and other creative writing courses are much loved, and he frequently creates writing exercises requiring the omission of certain letters of the alphabet.
Jeff Oaks' debut book of poetry, Little What, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in September 2019. A second book, The Things, will be out in March of 2022. A recipient of three Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowships, Oaks has published poems in Best New Poets, Field, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Superstition Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His prose has appeared in At Length, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Kenyon Review Online, and Water~Stone Review. Both his poems and prose have appeared in the anthologies Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton, 2015) and My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (U of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
Covid image courtesy of the CDC Public Health Image Library (PHIL)